John Ruple

Decades ago, Congress told the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management to prepare management plans for the lands charged to their care. Agencies spent years developing and then updating those plans. …But this Congress couldn’t palate some of those compromises, and instead of telling the BLM and Forest Service to fix specific plan provisions, Congress did what none before had done, it set fire to the offending plans. But it’s much worse than that. In using the Congressional Review Act to repeal individual plans, Congress inadvertently set ablaze the entire public land planning landscape. …Law professors from across the country told Congress that demolishing land management plans would spawn massively disruptive litigation. …Sadly, those predictions came true June 24 when environmentalists in Oregon filed suit to stop a logging project. …Reasonable people can disagree about how best to manage our public lands, but burning down the rules makes the problem worse, not better.